“This rug, handmade by a resident of the old age home, should serve as evidence of the willingness and ability of elderly people to work”: Elderly Survival Strategies in the Łódź Ghetto

Abstract

Abstract As a path to survival in the Łódź ghetto, “rescue through work” privileged the young and able-bodied. How did elderly ghetto inhabitants respond to the policies and demands of a strategy that inherently marginalized and disadvantaged them? Older men and women worked as long as physically possible, but the limitations of aging bodies were compounded by the deleterious effects of living in the ghetto. A scarcity of viable employment opportunities, taxing manual labor, and lack of food, forced most elderly men and women to seek alternative strategies. Petitions for survival reveal how older men and women supported the ghetto’s collective strategy for survival while simultaneously exploiting the rhetoric of “rescue through work” to challenge the ideological tenets at the very core of that strategy.